Thread: Opinion ;Importance of skilled immigrants

Importance of skilled immigrants



By BRAD SMITH | 7/26/11 5:26 AM EDT

Cities, states and nations now compete in a global talent pool — where high-skilled workers help create and attract employment opportunities. If the United States is going to create new jobs, and succeed competitively, we need to adapt to this rapidly changing global economy.

An important part of this effort is likely to turn on our ability to develop smart policies that ensure we nurture our own talent, and also attract the international, skilled workforce needed to ensure that the U.S. economy thrives.

Yet today the United States faces a skills gap in our economy. Investments in education are critical to addressing this. But so, too, is thoughtful reform of U.S. immigration laws.

Enhancing our country’s workforce depends on targeted efforts to attract relatively small numbers of the most skilled people from around the globe to come here.

A strategic high-skilled immigration policy does not mean a zero-sum competition for jobs against U.S. citizens. To the contrary, high-skilled immigration can help create more jobs here for both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals alike.

Our current immigration laws, however, don’t support this job creation goal. We face shortages of skilled workers in key sectors of our economy.

For example, in May, Microsoft had 4,551 unfilled job openings in the U.S. — 2,629 in computer science and engineering. Filling these critical positions cannot be done — and certainly not in the near term — exclusively through educational improvements in the United States. Meanwhile, per-country caps on employment-based green cards threaten to make it more difficult to fill these jobs with talent from overseas.

In addition, restrictions in student visa programs push many of our universities’ brightest foreign graduates to go work in other nations. Sixty percent of computer science Ph.D. graduates from U.S. universities last year were foreign nationals, many of whom faced restrictions on their ability to work in this country.

When we bring American and international talent together in the United States, we build and expand world-leading research and development centers here, rather than in other countries. These centers then create jobs for many more than the individuals employed there.

For example, every Washington state job at Microsoft supports 5.81 other jobs in the state economy, according to the University of Washington’s Economic Policy Research Center.


Given the fundamental changes in the global economy, it is striking that there has been no major change in U.S. immigration law since 1990. Substantial industries exist today that were only in their infancy two decades ago, creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs. These dynamic industries change rapidly and, with the aid of technology, they are highly portable – moving quickly to where talent is located around the globe.

Investments in education are critical to developing our “domestic talent.â€

I don't think so, all the high skilled immigrants do is ruin any opportunity for the new American graduate.

For a given skilled profession, e.g. computer programmer, There are certain number of jobs in the US and a certain number in various other countries. Companies in the US want to obtain the services of these professionals at the lowest cost. Hence, to the degree possible, they want to open the US labor market to skilled immigrants from the EU, Russia, Japan, China, India and Korea, to more easily substitute low cost foreign programmers, for expensive american workers. This is obviously a benefit to foreign workers. On the other hand american workers are trapped inside the US market because the foreign countries maintain a closed labor in which US workers are excluded. Therefore in fairness to american workers, we should only allow immigration of skilled workers from countries that allow similar immigration of american workers. This is only fair and creates a level playing field. Also since unemployment is high in the US we would probably end up exporting many more programmers than we import. In addition our business people would be able to start companies overseas and hence they could avoid american regulations and taxes. I propose that if we allow skilled immigration only from countries that accept skilled immigrants. Fair is Fair.